Preflight

Saying farewell to an aviation great

There's no way a couple-hundred-word obituary could do Bill justice, as anyone who knew him would attest. Nor could the comprehensive document that his family provided, although you could see Bill's fingerprints all over its text. It described Bill as a pilot, flight instructor, and author--that order would have been important to Bill.

Some 60 friends, relatives, and former students braved persistent snow to honor Bill at a celebration of his life on February 17. The memorial service, held in a hangar at Winchester (Tennessee) Municipal Airport, saw much warmth and laughter in spite of the cold outside. I had hoped to attend, but a last-minute emergency forced me to change my plans; from what I've heard, however, I think Bill would have very much appreciated the tribute.

Bill performed thousands of spins above the Winchester airport, just 8 nautical miles west of his base at Franklin County Airport in Sewanee, but I'm not sure he landed there very often. Always conservative, the 1992 national FAA/industry General Aviation Flight Instructor of the Year wanted to have a runway nearby on which to land if the engine quit and would not restart. (In the Cessna 152 Aerobat he used for spin training, spin forces move the fuel outboard in the wing tanks, unporting the fuel lines if the quantity was below a certain level--and stopping the engine--at about 13 turns.)

I believe it was in the fall of 1990 that I first met Bill, when I had the privilege of entertaining him; his wife, Betty; and another legendary aviation writer--the late Frank Kingston Smith--during an FAA Wings Weekend in North Carolina, where I worked at the time. Bill and I became fast friends, in part because we'd both lived in Clarksville, Tennessee, albeit at different times. Bill was born and raised in Clarksville, where he started flying in March 1945, when he was 15. It was some 40 years later, when I was a newspaper photographer--and had not yet been bitten by the aviation bug--that I lived in the area.

That part of Tennessee had a long history of growing tobacco, and it still was a popular crop around Clarksville in the 1980s. Tobacco there was flue-cured in barns, usually heated by wood fires. Every fall, as the tobacco was put up and farmers lit fires to begin the curing process, transiting pilots would report "a barn on fire" to flight service or air traffic control. You can imagine the confusion as aeronautical references were relayed to a fire department dispatcher, and fire crews checked dozens of nearly identical, smoking barns in their effort to determine whether one actually was on fire. That aeronautical tradition predated Bill's first flights, he told me with a grin.

Bill's entry to aviation followed what then was a fairly common path that, unfortunately, is seldom repeated today. He bicycled to Clarksville's Outlaw Field--then a grass strip--and worked as line boy, fueling, washing, and hand-propping airplanes in exchange for flight instruction. Twenty hours of work garnered a one-hour lesson. Bill earned his private, commercial, and flight instructor certificates there; he later acquired instrument rating and airline transport pilot credentials, and logged more than 11,000 flight hours.

In the early 1950s, he entered the Naval Aviation Cadet program in Pensacola, Florida, and flew World War II-era Navy fighters--including a tour flying F4U Corsair night fighters from the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Philippine Sea--and early jets. He graduated from Iowa State University at Ames, Iowa, in 1960, with a degree in technical journalism; he'd also taken a wide variety of aeronautical engineering courses.

Bill flew a variety of aircraft as a corporate pilot for Texas Gas Transmission Corp. in Owensboro, Kentucky. From 1960 to 1964, he worked for Piper Aircraft Corporation at Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, as a demonstration pilot, head of flight testing, and as assistant to company President William T. Piper Sr.

Student pilots are most likely to know Bill Kershner's name from his popular series of flight manuals. He wrote his first book, The Student Pilot's Flight Manual, in 1960; now in its ninth edition, the book has sold more than 1 million copies.

He and Betty moved to Sewanee in 1964, and Bill focused full-time on his writing. They built a house on a bluff not far from Tennessee's southern border, and Bill frequently quipped that from his study he could look down on Alabama. That study contained much memorabilia from Bill's years in aviation, many reference materials, and a number of aircraft models. Missing were a word processor or typewriter. Bill drafted--and illustrated--his manuscripts by hand; Betty then would type Bill's words.

Other books include The Advanced Pilot's Flight Manual, The Instrument Flight Manual, and The Flight Instructor's Manual. A memoir written in 2002, Logging Flight Time, contained many anecdotes from his flying career. He contributed often to AOPA Flight Training and AOPA Pilot. To read his articles in those publications, see AOPA Online.

Bill's children--his son Bill is an airline pilot and daughter Cindy is a freelance writer--will continue to update his flight manuals. Bill's wishes were that memorial contributions be made to the William and Elizabeth Kershner Scholarship Fund at the University of the South; the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.; or the Tennessee Aviation Museum in Sevierville, Tennessee. Another appropriate memorial to Bill would be to take aloft someone who has never flown before; sharing his enthusiasm for and knowledge of flying was Bill's greatest joy.

Bill continued to teach ground school until two weeks before his death. And he kept up with the latest developments in general aviation until his final days. When I last spoke with him in mid-December, we talked about glass cockpits--and he wondered how the new technology would handle spins.

If he could have been with us longer, it wouldn't have surprised me at all to learn that Bill borrowed a Garmin G1000-equipped Cessna 172 and took it out for a spin, even though he never felt he had properly spun that airplane. "I have had a great deal of difficulty spinning the 172," he told me, explaining that spins can be performed only in the Utility category, which puts the center of gravity so far forward that "I've never been able to get a successful spin."

We'll be looking for your next book, Bill. I'd love to know how well your Aerobat spins in heaven. Godspeed.